Entries from April 2006 ↓

It’s Sunday today.

• Adam: Friday.
• A: Thursday.
• Becky: Tuesday.
• A: It will be Tuesday in a minute.
• B: Ginger.
• B: Ears.
• B: Eyes.
• B: Our day.
• B: Plant day.
• A: It will be Friday in a minute.
• B: Stick day.

The whole point of GTD, for me, is that each project might have a bunch of actions, but only one is Next. My todo list should only have the things that don’t have prerequisites: the prerequisites should be on the list instead of the dependent action.

I don’t care very much for contexts… I have to make pretty agile decisions about what I’m working on, and sometimes that’s calling for an oil change from work, or doing a report from home. The overhead of having to ignore things I can’t get done from my physical location is minor compared to the overhead of maintaining contexts and thinking about how they all apply all the time.

I also have two PCs I use a lot, and the system (which is in the computer, of course,) should be reflected from one to the other.

The combination of pyGTD and FolderShare is actually meeting my needs quite nicely.  The idea is that you fill a “projects” folder with Fitness.txt, WeddingAnniversary.txt, Housework.txt, and each one is full of tasks:

* Clean the gutters.
1. Borrow a ladder.
2. Start scrapin’.

And a Python script (really!) churns through them, parsing everything out and giving you a reasonable to-do list.

Awesome story: I found this app through some dumb list on Listible, and having found a few bugs (and a note on the author’s website from a year ago, saying he’d update the documentation), I wrote him an email.  He real quickly said that he hadn’t used his script in a while, since it didn’t work on multiple PCs, but that my FolderShare solution sounded interesting.  So he might update it, and I might have helped him!

Either way, I have been doing my daily and weekly reviews, getting back in charge of the actual urgent things and the dumb someday-maybe stuff, and pretty happy about it.  This week was so busy, good lists were about my only salvation.

(Since the author doesn’t explain how he handles contexts, I’ll tell you in a little bit how I handle them.  It’s not hard, it’s just a little hacky.)

Tell me if you think this is a dumb idea.

I want to try eating less meat. We do a good job every once in a while, but I get myself into situations where I don’t make good food decisions. Heck, eating out all by itself can be a bad food decision, compared to the alternatives.

So here’s what I’ve been doing for the past three weeks: if I’m in a restaurant where I have any choice in the matter, I’m choosing the vegetarian option. The food shouldn’t be a problem: dining out is frequently a convenience decision, not a food-craving one. So far, I’ve been to Chipotle three times (veggie burrito: almost no sacrifice, really), Potbelly (pizza sub = mushrooms and sauce: pretty good), and Noodles n’ Company (mostly veggie anyway). Cheese pizza is, likewise, pretty much fine no matter what.

I’ve fallen back on tomato soup twice. It’s okay: definitely not my favorite. And McDonalds, despite pushing a new salad line, has no non-chicken salads aside from the side salad.

I don’t honestly expect to reap the benefits of a vegetarian diet and lifestyle by swapping out two meals a week for meatless options. On the other hand, it makes me think twice before ordering in restaurants, and even that little second of hunting for some non-meat thing can give me a little time to say “hey, what are we really doing with food here? Are we really that hungry?”

Thursday night (that’s tonight, if it’s Thursday where you are), Bob Nordquist and the Intangibles are playing their CD release party at the Cedar Cultural Center. $12. A lot of you know Bob (he’s my uncle), and if you don’t know his music, you’ll probably dig it. I’ll go so far as to say that, against the other shows you’ll go to because you know someone on stage, this will be the coolest of all those.

If you do end up going, track us down. We’ll be kidless, so, y’know, wasted.

I just found the most amazing thing on Bloglines. If you’ve got Google News search results, or iTunes RSS feeds, or even just a perfectionist blogger in your feed lists, you know that Bloglines is popping new results in your face every time something changes. There’s a setting, it turns out, for each feed, for “updated items”. The default is “Treat as new”, which is very wrong. The best way to handle it, except for feeds where the updates are really useful (like, let’s say, iTunes charts, where you want to know when new Pussycat Dolls goes from 8 to 6, and then to 2, and then to the number 1 spot), is to select “Ignore”.

You might laugh (esp. if you’re not using Bloglines, because this distinction will seem especially petty, or if you really like Pussycat Dolls, and then your laughter is the nervous laughter of acknowledgement), but this was getting to be a serious problem. 37 news sites might carry the same AP story, but any time any of them twiddles a headline or corrects the punctuation, the whole Google search pops to the top of your notifications. I went so far as to unsubscribe from a few feeds, because the blog authors would touch an entry twice an hour for two days. They probably didn’t even know they were sending new notificiations to everyone, but that’s the state we’re in with RSS at the moment.

And if you’re not using Bloglines, get an account today, for the love of god. Stop clicking on your bookmarks to see if sites have changed. Totally 1998.

I was reading in the Tool FAQ that Tool videos are (or some, I guess, have been) influenced by the work of the Brothers Quay, animators who were themselves influenced by some seriously bizarre Eastern European masters. A good two hours of their work is collected in a DVD, including the minute-long piece that appeared on MTV during commercial breaks, where a magnet flips around collecting metal shavings, and creepy looking porcelain doll observes the whole thing while spoons grow out of the wall. Unsettling is an excellent way to describe it.

I got the new Donald Fagen and the new Paul McCartney last month.  It should not shock you that I prefer the ex-Steely Dan-guy’s output to the ex-Beatle’s.  He does way more interesting stuff from a compositional perspective.  (There’s almost nothing jazzy about any of the Beatles.)  There is a weird progression on the chorus of the title track of “Morph the Cat”, and if that sounds like something you might be into, you should check it out.

Adam’s home sick today. He rolled up to me on his car.

“I’m gonna to have some ice cream.”

“Is that right? Who’s going to give you ice cream?”

“The guy.”

“Which guy is going to give you ice cream?”

“The regular guy. I’m going to go to the ice cream store.”

“Really.”

“Are we gonna to go to the ice cream store?”

“We might.”

“Let’s go to the ice cream store. Let’s put on our stuff.”

The funny thing about posting the conversations these days is that it’s not immediately apparent who’s talking. He’s just toddled up again to give me a message, like Mr. McFeely does. Busy, busy days for the Nordquist twins.